Igor

A modest do-gooder trying to pretend that its not Cartoonland's most direct attack of the Bush administration.

While much of the banter between the characters is inventive, the plot turns are predictable - complete with a romantic misunderstanding straight out of The Karate Kid (and 20 other films).

You can think of it as an animated riff on the American dream: Our fate is determined not by the accident of our birth, but our own will, intelligence and talent. And let's not forget serendipity.

Pieced together from Tim Burton and various other sources with more desperation than inspiration.

Like most acts of cruel mediocrity committed in the name of entertaining children, Igor presumably seemed like a good idea at the time.

My kid went with it, and I had a fairly good time, as I waited for the reappearance of a marble-mouthed peasant tart, voiced by Jennifer Coolidge. Half the time her line readings are hilarious, and it's impossible to know why.

While not quite as alive as I'd wish, this is still a movie with more electric creativity then a lot of other stuff I've seen this year, and as far as kids are concerned this is one experiment worth letting them conduct by themselves.

Even the desolate future envisioned in this summer's hit Wall-E has more immediate appeal for kids who might not be familiar with the source material for Igor.

While this is no WALLE, or Ratatouille, it does bring to mind Monsters, Inc. and some of the visual flair of Burton's The Corpse Bride.

To convince you that it's full of surprises, the movie throws in Louis Prima songs where they don't belong, and it riffs on classic monster-movie cliches mostly by spinning them into newly unfunny cliches.

There's scant reward for sitting through Igor, an animated twist on the Frankenstein story that never sparks to life.

Igor tries to spoof Mary Shelley just as Shrek did the Brothers Grimm, but something tells us this movie's charmless hero won't make an ogre-size impression on kid audiences. Call it a hunch.

While the stitches holding together the plot are clearly visible, Igor breathes some enjoyable life into its stolen grab-bag of gimmicks.

Director Tony Leondis and screenwriter Chris McKennna have mined everything from Young Frankenstein to Sleepy Hollow to Japanese anime to the German Neo-Expressionists to create that rare thing, a cartoon for adults.

Director Anthony Leondis peppers his tale with a host of leaden cinematic references children will almost surely miss, which is just as well since virtually every film-related gag directed at adults feels like a pitiful attempt at knowing cleverness.

There's enough good stuff here that a better 'toon could have been stitched together from the many promising funny parts.

The tone of the movie is cheerily macabre.

A potentially original premise and an eager voice cast led by John Cusack and Molly Shannon are left to decay amid a clunky story vaguely reminiscent of Monsters, Inc. and images often resembling visuals rejected from Tim Burton's Corpse Bride.

Although the visuals tantalize and the actors providing the voices add a lot of sass, the result is only so-so.